A comfort facility for passengers combines a chair with a bed. The facility is useful in trains, ships, and particularly in passenger aircraft.
Efforts to make travel, especially long distance travel, as comfortable as possible are well known in the art. For example, aircraft passenger chairs that convert into a bed and vice versa are used in so-called jumbo passenger aircraft. FIG. 1 shows a floor plan of an upper deck cabin of a Boeing 747-200 passenger aircraft. The upper deck cabin 1 covers a floor space of about 15xc3x9717 feet and holds a total of eight convertible chairs 2, four of which are positioned on each side of an aisle 3. The relatively large floor space taken up by these convertible chairs or chair beds could be used more efficiently or at least with an improved comfort.
FIG. 2 shows a chair 2 converted into a bed. These chairs are quite bulky and not as comfortable as might be expected. The floor area needed for each chair is quite substantial without providing a correspondingly large sleeping surface.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,474,260 (Schwertfeger et al.) discloses a large bodied aircraft with two decks. The lower deck is equipped with bedrooms and a sick bay with a bed or beds. However, these beds are not convertible, but may be constructed as bunkbeds.
It is also known to convert a passenger chair into a bed by a pull-out seat which provides a bed width of two feet which is not particularly comfortable. The foot end of the bed surface rests on a box that may also be used as a footrest.
In view of the above it is the aim of the invention to achieve the following objects singly or in combination:
to construct a passenger chair so that its seat surface, or its seat surface and one of its armrest surfaces, can cooperate with a separate bed section without changing the configuration of the chair;
to provide a separate bed section which can also be used with its surface for other purposes, for example as a table surface next to the respective chair;
to use the space available in a passenger aircraft with more comfort for the passenger than was possible heretofore;
to construct a chair/bed combination so that it can accommodate different space requirements for different passengers; and
to construct a chair bed combination as lightweight as possible without sacrificing safety.
The above objects have been achieved according to the invention by a chair and bed combination particularly for a passenger, wherein a chair has a seat forming a seat surface that cooperates with a separate bed section forming a bed surface and wherein components for cooperation bring at least the seat surface or the bed surface into a position for cooperation with the respective other surface for forming together a sleeping surface.
In certain embodiments a seat surface and at least one armrest surface cooperate with a separate bed surface to form a sleeping surface which is at least six feet long and thirty inches wide.
In another embodiment a laterally displaceable armrests provide a seating area or surface of variable widths for accommodating different passenger sizes.
At least one armrest is movable either only vertically up and down or horizontally back and forth, or it can be tilted into cooperation with a bed surface and a seat surface so that the three surfaces together form the sleeping surface.
In a particularly lightweight construction a mattress such as a foam mattress is supported on a roll-up bed support which is made of a flexible but tough fabric suspended between a support bar and a spring roller which rolls up the fabric when the bed is not in use while the mattress is moved out of the way. The fabric is tough enough to form the bed surface and flexible enough to be taken up by the spring roller which functions in the manner of a roll-up window shade. The mattress can be tilted out of the way when the fabric bed support is rolled up.
In another embodiment one armrest is movable along a guide track between three positions, namely a vertical armrest position, a first horizontal bed position, and a second, somewhat higher horizontal table position.
The bed supporting surface is either mounted on a pedestal or the like in a fixed position or it is mounted on a piston cylinder device for positioning the bed surface or the bed support in at least two positions, namely a table position or a bed position.